Posts Tagged ‘No GOP support on Stimulus Bill’

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she didn’t come to Washington to be “bipartisan”, one day after shuttling through an $819 economic stimulus bill without a single Republican vote.

“I didn’t come here to be partisan, I didn’t come here to be bipartisan,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference. “I came here, as did my colleagues, to be nonpartisan, to work for the American people, to do what is in their interest.”

Pelosi expressed no regrets over passing the stimulus measure without any GOP support. Republicans followed their leaders in objecting to the bill on the grounds that it was put together without GOP input, and that it would not do enough to stimulate the economy.

Repeating the term “nonpartisan” on more than one occasion in describing the bill, the Speaker said her goal was to put President Obama’s vision on paper for the good of the country regardless of the type of support it garnered.

“The president’s agenda is reflected in this legislation,” the Speaker said. “People vote for what they believe in. Clearly, Republicans did not believe in [that] agenda … I think they probably voted their conscience.”

And she quickly defended her handling of the bill, which was criticized by Republicans and some Democrats as too one-sided.

“We reached out to Republicans every step of the way, and they know it,” Pelosi said. “They know it.”

“They were part of the original bill,” she added. “Some of the tax provisions were their suggestions. They had what they asked for in terms of committee markups. They had a rule on the floor that gave them plenty of opportunity to make changes. They just didn’t have the ideas that had the support of the majority.

“When you can’t win on policy, you always turn to process, and then you turn to personalities,” Pelosi said.

In contrast to her claim that her intent was to take a nonpartisan approach to passing the stimulus bill, a top aide to the Speaker struck a sharply partisan tone earlier in the day when he accused the GOP of acting in a “partisan and irresponsible manner” in objecting to the bill.

“There’s a pattern here of Republican economic mismanagement and Democrats stepping up to do what’s needed for the good of the country while Republicans acted in a partisan and irresponsible manner,” Brendan Daly, Pelosi’s top spokesman, wrote in a memo distributed to reporters Thursday morning.